I can't find enough time in the day to read even one single email list (fpc-pascal), let alone two, or more..

How in the world do people (you) keep up with reading email lists and not waste the entire day?

It seems some of you have super human powers that I don't have, to be able to both program, and email, and read email, and cook/work.

I can barely keep up with one email list, and fpc is not even that popular of a list compared to others...

Maybe I'm a retard and my brain is slow, but how the f**k do you keep up with all these emails and have any time for programming, cooking, working, hiking, possibly a relationship with opposite sex?

There is just no time.

I'm positive that some of you are just clever A.I. bots posing as humans.. that's where your super powers come from. You're not actually humans..

Reason for posting this to fpc-other: obvious.

Subscribe to gmane.comp.compilers.free-pascal.social Subscribe to gmane.comp.compilers.free-pascal.devel Subscribe to gmane.comp.compilers.free-pascal.general Subscribe to gmane.comp.ide.lazarus.general

on news.gmane.org

using Mozilla Thunderbird

enable threaded view

take a course in speed reading

read the posts using 'space' to scroll down and to go to next post.

Just finished the .social, .devel, .general ~60 posts and posted 2 replies

6 messages in .lazarus.general remaining

~20 minutes more or less

Sorted :)

or use the gmane.org web interface :) I just noticed it came back with a new team (after previous maintainer got scared of being sued out of existence by some half wit)

(EDIT : they are not back yet with the web interface... but it at least seems to be worked on)

-L.

How in the world do people (you) keep up with reading email lists and not waste the entire day?

I'm between jobs! And all my gardening chores are already done. :-P

Regards,
Graeme

I'm positive that some of you are just clever A.I. bots posing as humans.. that's where your super powers come from. You're not actually humans..

Hahaha, you got that right! That's my secret! :)

Nikolay

I'm positive that some of you are just clever A.I. bots posing as humans.. that's where your super powers come from. You're not actually humans..

Or we have a couple of clones - human trials started ages ago in some countries. ;-)

Regards,
Graeme

Hi,

Nikolay Nikolov wrote

> I'm positive that some of you are just clever A.I. bots posing as > humans.. that's where your super powers come from. You're not actually > humans.. Hahaha, you got that right! That's my secret! :)

For the record, I met him in person already, and I can confirm this. :)

Charlie

...proving just that you're another A.I. bot. ;-) However, I'm afraid that I belong into the same category, because there are people who could claim meeting both the two of you and me. ;-)

Tomas

In our previous episode, said:

How in the world do people (you) keep up with reading email lists and not waste the entire day?

Avoid the following
- long discussions about new features
-> design by committee was never successful anyway.
- anything with "Schnell" and "unicode"
- preferably anything with "huys" and 'git" :-)

Seriously, just be selective, and use a threaded reader that allows you to skip/ignore threads. Speed read and if not interesting, immediately skip the lot.

p.s. though I use ELM which isn't threaded, with "l" you can get a view of all msgs with one subject, which I use. For Lazarus for which I read much fewer threads I do use MUTT though.

Marco van de Voort wrote

- preferably anything with "huys" and 'git" :-)

Awesome, I made the list. :)

Seriously, just be selective, and use a threaded reader that allows you to skip/ignore threads.

Agreed. And if you are using Mozilla Thunderbird, learn to use the “R” key. If the thread is not already marked Ignored, the “R” key will mark the whole thread as Read.

I only read threads with a subject line that catches my attention. I also have a filter that tags all messages that mention my name - seeing as I don't read every message in the mailing list.

Regards,
Graeme

Maybe I'm a retard and my brain is slow, but how the f**k do you keep up with all these emails and have any time for programming, cooking, working, hiking, possibly a relationship with opposite sex?

Well, for one thing, skip the emails and use the GMane News server interface to the mail list instead!
This particular list is in gmane.comp.compilers.free-pascal.social for example.

Then you will get a threaded view and can easily navigate quickly between the various posts. You see immediately to which sub-branch of a discussion a response was made etc etc.
And you do not clutter your inbox so you miss important real emails to you.

Marco van de Voort wrote

In our previous episode, said:> > How in the world do people (you) keep up with reading email lists and > not waste the entire day?

Some of it's reputation. It's obviously always worth knowing Florian and Jonas's position on even a noisy controversy, and there's other contributors who might not say much but are usually worth reading.

Some of it's authority and experience. I'm genuinely grateful to Graeme for answering my questions on Git yesterday, even if most of the time he pushes it far harder than many of us enjoy.

while i understand what you are saying, i always get a huge belly laugh when someone says anything about cluttering an inbox... that's just crazy when you have filters that can easily move new mail to its own folder for reading... each of the FPC related mailing lists comes into my thunderbird and is filtered to its own (sub)folder where the messages are read in threaded mode... it is faster and available to me even when i'm offline... plus i have a local copy of all the messages so i can search historically if desired...

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

even if most of the time he pushes it far harder than many of us enjoy.

I’m afraid it’s an occupational habit. My job as a technical consultant and developer often requires me to come up with more efficient ways of doing things. Yes, inefficient ways and code really grind on me. I’ll try my best not to push this any further here.

Regards,
Graeme

Which is exactly how a newsreader works too, you download the messages into the NR and then they are available offline forever and searchable too.

My FPC message store reaches back to Sept 2003 and similarly for Borland/Embarcadero Delphi lists (might go even further back on these).
I have ALL messages from these places collected for future reference.

But my observation is that email is not the best way of managing these things even if you *can* create some folder structure. Email clients evolve a lot and suddenly your old store of messages is not readable anymore. And if you like to switch mail client you are in big trouble. Try to import Outlook PST files with millions of messages into Thunderbird and you will see what I mean...
Both Forte Free Agent and Xananews store the data in a sensible format...

I /am/ trying to be neutral on this, but I think it has pretty much been done to death here: particularly since Florian has given his ruling.

However it's interesting to note occasional discussion elsewhere about things like KiCAD (PCB layout etc. software) using Github or similar as an element of the workflow... but I really can't see anything in FPC development and use which presents a compelling requirement for that sort of thing.

/If/ somebody could think of a good example, perhaps for a Lazarus IDE plugin which would benefit from collaborative rather than centralised development, perhaps they'd care to start a new thread.

Bo Berglund wrote

But my observation is that email is not the best way of managing these things even if you *can* create some folder structure. Email clients evolve a lot and suddenly your old store of messages is not readable anymore.

I've been working on and off (more off than on these days) on a local project where I am rethinking emails completely. I too never delete emails and my archives go back nearly 15 years. It's a nightmare to find anything, because I used multiple email clients over the years.

So my new project splits the "email client" into two parts. The headless email daemon/service. This does the polling of the inbox in one or more mail accounts, and also does all the sorting of messages (via user defined filters). Messages are then stripped apart and stored in a Firebird database (other database servers like MySQL (G*d forgive me), Oracle, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server etc) are also supported. No information is lost, and the original email (pristine and untouched) can be regenerated from all the parts.

When I say "filtering", I really mean messages are tagged. There is no such thing as a physical "folder" (tables) in the database. By default new messages will get the "new" tag assigned to them, and whatever other active filters are available to that account.

I then have the GUI front-end, which doesn't actually do any emailing at all. It is simply a client/server application (but can also be recompiled to be a 3-tier client via HTTP). The filters create a "virtual" treeview structure of your messages. Moving a message from one folder to another, doesn't physically move the message, it simply update the tag associated with that message, which then makes in appear in a different location in the GUI. Multiple tags can be applied to the same message, so you can find the message in many ways, and no duplicate copies of the message exists. Full-Text Searching is supported too.

Posting a new email creates a new database entry, and tagged with the outgoing "queued" tag. I've defined (user configurable) a 5 minute delay before outgoing messages are actually sent. The daemon will then pick up those queued messages and physically send the emails at the right time. Emails can also be scheduled for sending at a specific date and time of your choosing.

The daemon also has the ability to import existing emails from Mbox (MailBox) files or IMAP folders.

This opens up multiple possibilities. If you don't like the default GUI front end, change it or build your own, or even design a web-based version, or create a console version (that mimics your ELM or Alpine clients).

The database table structure is pretty straight forward, no DB specific stored procedures are used - so very portable to other database servers. The database communication is all done via objects and abstracted away using the tiOPF framework. The current GUI client also uses tiOPF to communicate with the database or the middle tier app server.

The project is far from complete, but whenever I have a spare moment I work on it further. I hope to one day unify all my email archives into a single database and easily searchable via the GUI frontend.

Regards,
Graeme

Except that all the Algol features designed by a committee are slipping their way into today's languages because people are smarter now and can actually implement the features on newer computers, whereas back in the 1960's they were very limited... Think about this: all the languages now that have type inference or similar (GoLang has something where you don't have to declare variables but it's still strongly typed), and think about local scoop loop iterators which many languages have. Everyone that was a skeptic of committee designed languages didn't want these features in their language, so projects spun off such as AlgolW (wirth's small algol work) which became Pascal. But now adays all the old algol committee designed features are sneaking their way into everything... Not that this is necessarily a good thing I'm not sure, but we know Small languages like AlgolW/Standard Pascal failed due to not having enough work done on them by lots of folk (like a committee) but on the other hand large languages of today such as C++/Ada are mammoths

- anything with "Schnell" and "unicode" - preferably anything with "huys" and 'git" :-)

Well you probably don't want to here my rants on Unicode as it's a mess and I don't have a solution, so possibly ignore all 505 unicode posts Haha.

Also agree, web mail has this feature if anyone has Roundcube.

Indeed you can hide all the mailing list into one folder so its not visible. But once you start opening that folder and trying to read through, say 5 lists, your day is just used up - especially if you stop to help someone on the list and then have to open up fpc to test your idea/help hint you gave to them.

I'm convinced you are all lying a.i. bots with super powers, though

The issue becomes if you do meet a human in real life, it could just be a brain wave sent to your brain to interpret it as a human inside your brain, like an opengl render scene injected into your neurons, so you never know if it is a true human.

Someone, for example, like Lawrence Krauss, is strikingly smart scientist who I cannot imagine being a human being as he has all this database of science in his head that no human could hold in a brain

why one folder? i have

inbox
sent
junk
trash
outbox
apple
freepascal related
fpc-devel
fpc-other
fpc-pascal
lazarus
synapse
ham radio
linux stuff
and so on and so on and so on

But once you start opening that folder and trying to read through, say 5 lists,

5 lists is 5 (sub)folders...

your day is just used up - especially if you stop to help someone on the list and then have to open up fpc to test your idea/help hint you gave to them.

back in the 80s, i used to work 10-12 hour days and then come home and read 500+ messages in numerous fidonet echomail areas... of those 500+ messages i read, i would write at least 20-25 replies containing support information... t'was no big deal... i still do the same but fidonet is not as active as it was back in the day and these mailing lists are also not as much... but i still receive an average of 500 messages a day in my email...

I'm convinced you are all lying a.i. bots with super powers, though

hahaha... nope... just experienced readers of messages who have learned how to work through them fairly quickly and easily... i will grant that it does take an hour or two... if i'm offering someone some help and have to go write code, i do that over several days... even if it means skipping some reading a day or two...

And on top of that, experienced enough to use a proper email client, with proper message filtering, instead of (ab)using a web browser just just another task... ;-)

Ralf

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Indeed I hate web based programs of all kinds, but, after lots of my email clients corrupted their databases which were not in plain text and I lost my emails, I started using web servers and web programs as email clients for lots of email. Thunderbird was an option, as AFAIR you could store email as plain text, which is easier to recover if there is a failure, but thunderbird, was bloated and took up way too much memory. Sylpheed claws was another one I was interested in, as it had one of the most advanced "Rule" system to automate tasks. More advanced than any I could find.. it has changed names to claws-mail

However, IMO it has nothing to do with filtering out email because you still have to read the email lists and read through emails no matter how much you filter things. It's not like you can magically guess that "all emails regarding anything to do with VARARGS I want to delete" because 2 months later you may need varargs help. Or, it's not like you can magically guess that you don't want any emails coming in that have anything to do with fixed arrays, because you don't use fixed arrays - but maybe you will in 2 months!

Setting up thousands of filters is a time waster too...

But, this does bring me back to the sylpheed claws exploration days when I was really into automating email rules using advanced filtering/rulesets. I don't use them much any more but I used to use them like crazy

Well if we want to come up with an efficient way of doing things, it's possible that Git and SVN are both not the answer to development model. The answer may be to start up a campus, similar to microsoft campus, with multiple buildings and developers that can literally knock on each others door when needing assistance :-)

i.e. freepascal becomes a campus... with social eating events in the that would require funding and relocating of all developers, and, even in a campus you'd probably still use svn/git anyway :-)

Forgot about another solution to wasting time on email.. The Donald Knuth solution! Simply do not use email, and demand people write you letters in the mail if they wish to receive a reply...

Not sure what Knuth is up to lately or what his software projects are. But although I find this solution funny, it's also not as good when you need instant help for something - but it does save you time just by completely opting out of email altogether. You laugh, but how much time do you spend reading emails: Start calculating :-)

I am using Thunderbird, on Windows 7/8.1/10, macOS and Linux Mint Mate for several years now, ever since I had due to a move switch away from my old desktop running Eudora as the email client and use a laptop instead. And it has the benefit now that it runs on all three main OS that I use every day.
And that is using 6 different email addresses (right now, one specifically for ), all using IMAP for ages now. And compared to the amount of memory you are using in a web browser to get even close to the comforts you get with a real email client, it is rather "lean and mean"...

Then you do not understand how you can apply filtering. You can mark threads you are not interested in as "read on arrival", or depending on the subject, move them in logical subfolders where you can read them as needed. Likewise, you can mark "hot topics" with a tag, having them show up not only a new/unread, but with certain colors. You can filter not only on subject but also on sender (for better or worse ;-) ), text occurring in the body, etc...
This way, you can have the computer do the most tedious part, separating "signal from noise", which largely helps to reduce the number of emails you actually "have to read". For me, that is on average maybe 10-20% of the daily emails.
And why do you want to delete any emails, unless they are complete and utter nonsense/spam (which barely happens in any of the FPC mailing lists at least)?. I have all emails from the FPC lists going back to early 2013, when I got by previous laptop and switched some accounts from POP3 to IMAP, and it would just take a restore from some old backup to get any previous emails back, probably at least to 2002 or so. And if you are looking for a certain topic/keyword from past posts, you can do a search just fine, which you might have to do anyway if you are looking for something in a past thread, as I seriously doubt that you remember exactly where and when someone posted that info you might be looking for a few months later...

Setting up thousands of filters is a time waster too...

Pick you poison... But, as far as setting up filters goes, most of it is a one time thing. It might be a bit more if you just get started, but it will reduce and become second nature over time if you keep using it, saving you a lot of time in the long run. And TBird does filters much better than any other email client out there right now, I barely miss Eudora these days anymore...

Ralf

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